[pardon the technical glitches - we've had some issues in recording and editing!]
What if the healing of the bleeding woman wasn’t just a private miracle—but a public confrontation with shame, exclusion, and bad theology? And what if we’ve taken the wrong approach to holiness?
We assume holiness must be protected from impurity—that we must keep the unholy and impure at arms length, because we fear that holiness will be tainted by the unholy. But Jesus shows in his encounter with this woman that quite the opposite is true. Rather than avoid the unholy and impure, true holiness actually seeks it out—it goes to the dark and impure spaces and people of the world, not to call them out or “witness” to them and then leave them in their place, but to bring them healing, acceptance, and transformation.
In this powerful episode of What the Bible Actually Says, Dr Tyson Putthoff unpacks the healing of the woman who touches Jesus’ tzitzit—the sacred fringe or tassel of his garment—in Mark 5. But this isn’t just about one woman’s faith. It’s about Jesus publicly dismantling a system that said she didn’t belong.
We explore the honor-shame culture of Second Temple Judaism, the ritual purity laws of Leviticus 15, and the mystical significance of tzitzit as symbolic conduits of divine presence and healing power. From the structure of Mark’s “story sandwich” (intercalation) to the theological reversal at the heart of the scene, this episode shows how Jesus doesn’t just heal the body—he restores dignity, reorders priority, and redefines holiness itself.
If you’ve ever felt sidelined by religion, society, or politics, shamed by your past, or taught that God only stops for the pure and powerful—this episode is for you.
· Listen now to see how Jesus stops a miracle in motion… to affirm the one everyone else had tried to ignore.
· Check out show notes and biblical text handouts at BibleActuallySays.com
· Grab Volumes 1 and 2 of my new book Jesus: The Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and His Movement at Hekhal.co or on Amazon.
· Subscribe, review, and share this episode with someone who needs Jesus’ healing.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:14):
What's up everybody? Welcome to the What the Bible
Actually Says podcast. I'm your host, Tyson put off,
and I'm so glad to have you heretoday.
If this is your first time listening, Bao Kaba, welcome to
the show. If you're a regular listener,
Bohem Hashaveem, welcome back. Before we dive in, don't forget
to subscribe on your favorite platform so you don't ever miss
(00:35):
an episode. And head over to
bibleactuallysays.com. Check out what we have going on
over there and what's coming up next.
And if you've been enjoying the show, I'd love it if you'd leave
a rating or share it with someone who's ready to go deeper
into their study of the Bible. Also, an incredibly exciting
announcement. I want to let you know that my
book, Jesus, the Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and
(00:57):
His Movement came out on May 30th.
That was Volume 1. Volume 2 is due out on June
30th. So here in just a couple of
days, it's volume one and two ofthe three volume series
published with Hey Call Publishing Co.
And it's the perfect companion to this podcast.
If you've enjoyed what we're doing here, digging deeper into
Jesus's life, his words, his mission, his historical and
(01:20):
theological and cosmic context, these books go even further.
They're accessible, they're eye opening and packed with insights
that'll change the way you see Jesus.
I guarantee it. And you can find more about
those or order your copy at several places.
I'll put a link at the podcast website, bibleactuallysays.com
or on heycall.co, the publisherswebsite.
(01:41):
Or if it's easiest for you, justgo to Amazon.
The ebook for volume 2 is up forpre-order now print copy.
As I say, it will be out June 30th.
So mark your calendars. Again.
This is volume one and two of my3 volume study of Jesus as
presented in the Gospels. And it's going to change the way
you see Jesus and it's going to give you clarity on what it
(02:02):
means to follow him in a world in which bad information and bad
takes on Jesus are all over the place.
So check it out. All right, let's dive in.
If you've got a Bible nearby, goahead, grab it because we're
going to look at the text closely today.
We're going to walk through thismoment in full.
And if you're on the go, don't worry.
Listen closely. Let's story unfold and read it
(02:24):
once you have a moment. So we're in Mark chapter 5
today, starting in verse 21. Let's read the text Mark 521 to
24. When Jesus had again crossed
over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd
gathered around him while he wasby the lake.
Then one of the synagogue leaders named Gyrus came, and
(02:45):
when he saw Jesus, he fell at Jesus's feet.
He pleaded earnestly with him. My little daughter is dying.
Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be
healed and live. So Jesus went with a large
crowd, followed and pressed around him.
OK, so at this point in Mark's gospel, Jesus's reputation is
swelling. Everywhere he goes, crowds
(03:05):
follow. He's been healing the sick,
casting out demons, teaching andthreatening the authorities, and
word about him and his movement is spreading.
And by this point, he's not justanother Galilean rabbi.
He's becoming a public force, a prophet, a movement, and he's
gaining steam everywhere he goes.
So when Gyrus, who's a synagogueleader, someone who's well known
(03:27):
and well respected, falls at Jesus's feet pleading for his
daughter's life, it's a moment of urgency.
And Mark makes that clear in hisgospel.
And it's also a moment of opportunity.
Gyrus isn't just a grieving father.
He's a man of standing, a religious authority, a
gatekeeper of institutional approval.
If Jesus helps this man, it could gain him legitimacy in the
(03:48):
eyes of those who still see him as dangerous and unconventional
and uncredentialed at this point.
And so Jesus goes with him. But what happens next is deeply
unsettling. So let's pick it back up in
verse 25. So it's Mark 525 to 34.
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12
(04:08):
years. She had suffered a great deal
under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had.
Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse.
When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd
and touched his cloak. Because she thought, if I just
touch his clothes, I'll be healed.
Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she felt in her
body that she was freed from hersuffering.
(04:31):
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him.
He turned around in the crowd and asked, Who touched my
clothes? You see the people crowding
against you? His disciples answered.
And yet you can ask, who touchedme?
But Jesus kept looking around tosee who had done it.
Then the woman, knowing what hadhappened to her, came and fell
at his feet, and trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.
(04:55):
He said to her Daughter, Your faith has healed you.
Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.
So this is where the story takesa really surprising turn,
because Jesus is in the middle of a mission to save a dying
child, Gyrus's daughter. And instead of just going
straight there to save Gyrus's daughter, he stops.
He pauses the entire procession,and not for another man of
(05:17):
prominence or for some new crisis that suddenly arises.
He stops for a woman who doesn'teven speak.
She doesn't make a scene. She simply reaches out from the
crowd and touches the hem or theseat.
Seat, you'll hear me. Call it, or tassel of his
garment. This woman, she's unnamed, is,
by every cultural and religious standard, invisible.
She's richly impure because of her bleeding, likely cut off
(05:41):
from normal worship, excluded from family intimacy, almost
certainly viewed as a contaminant in public.
And yet Jesus stops, not just for a moment, but fully and
intentionally. He turns to find her.
He looks for her. He listens to her whole story.
He speaks to her directly. In a society built around status
(06:02):
and honor and public recognition, as we've discussed
especially in our episodes on Luke 14, if you haven't heard
those, go back and listen to those.
In a society based around honor,Jesus redirects attention from
the powerful over and over to the marginalized, from those
with honor, to those who don't have honor, or to those who
have. He in this case directs
(06:22):
attention from a respected male leader to a suffering woman who
was used to hiding in the shadows.
And he does it deliberately. This isn't just an interruption.
This is what I would call a theological disruption.
Jesus halts a miracle for someone with standing in order
to restore someone. The system had failed.
Some of the religious world would have said was cursed,
(06:43):
someone who had spent 12 years hearing silence from God and
shame from everyone around her. And in doing so, Jesus forces
the crowd and us, I think, to confront a pretty difficult
question. What kind of Kingdom is Jesus's
Kingdom? What kind of empire is Jesus's
empire? What does that look like in
Jesus's mind? Because whatever this is, it's
(07:05):
not just about healing physical illness.
It's about the redistribution ofdignity.
It's about whom we see and whom we are willing to stop for.
It's about power that doesn't run through respectable
channels, but flows through compassion, risk, and presence.
Jesus doesn't just perform a miracle.
He rewrites the priorities of the moment.
And that sets the tone for everything else that follows.
(07:28):
So if you've been following in this podcast series, you might
remember a storytelling technique that we looked at back
in the episode on the Widow's Mite, what scholars call a mark
and sandwich, or what we might more formally call an
intercalation. Mark uses this structure more
than any other gospel writer. He begins one story, breaks it
off to insert a seemingly unrelated scene, and then
(07:50):
returns to conclude the first story.
It's really a tactic not just that Mark uses literally, but
that Jesus himself uses. And Mark just highlights this
about Jesus, the way he'll sandwich events or moments or
lessons between other ones to make multiple important,
exponentially greater points allat the same time.
So these narrative interruptionsare deliberate.
(08:12):
They're crafted not to distract,but to interpret.
The inner story and the outer frame are meant to reflect each
other, creating this sort of contrast and deepening the
meaning. And Jesus knew this, and Mark
knows this. And that's why Mark emphasizes
this when he's retelling his gospel story about Jesus.
And most importantly, the story in the middle.
(08:33):
It's rarely secondary, so it's not less important, but more
often than not, it's more important.
It's the key to the whole story.And that's exactly what we see
here in Mark 5. The episode begins with urgency.
Gyrus is a synagogue leader. He comes to Jesus in
desperation. His daughter is dying, and he
falls at Jesus's feet, begging him to come quickly.
(08:53):
Now, you got to understand, Gyrus isn't just any father.
He's a religious official, whichalso means he's a man with
standing and influence and honorand likely wealth.
And in the tightly woven social fabric of 1st century Galilee, a
man like Gyrus would have stood at the top.
So when he comes to Jesus and begs Jesus for help, people get
(09:13):
out of the way. The crowd makes room for his
request. Culturally, it would have been
assumed that if Jesus wanted to do what was right, he would have
prioritized this man's request to That would have been
culturally right. That would have been acceptable,
and that would have been viewed as the right thing to do in
God's eyes by everyone around. But before Jesus even reaches
(09:35):
the house, Gyrus's house, beforethe elite man's daughter can be
healed, the story is interrupted.
This whole episode is interrupted, and this is when
this woman enters. She's not named, she's not
announced, she's not welcomed. She's just there.
And really, we don't even see her until a few lines in to the
story. But this woman, she reaches
(09:55):
through the crowd and she touches Jesus's garment, which
sets off a chain of events that brings everything to a halt.
Mark tells us the woman had beensuffering from a flow of blood
for 12 years. Mark 525.
While the text doesn't specify the exact nature of her
condition, the language suggestsA chronic uterine hemorrhage.
This condition, especially in the ancient world, would have
(10:16):
caused constant bleeding, weakness, pain.
But beyond the physical toll, which would have been incredibly
hard on this woman, the consequences for her religious
and social and theological life were far more severe.
According to Leviticus 15, a woman with a menstrual discharge
is considered ritually impure. OK, for whatever reason, didn't
(10:38):
even matter. This designation wasn't about
sinfulness. It was about ritual status in
relation to sacred space and communal life.
Yet the practical effects were devastating on women.
Everything she touched, her bed,her chair, her clothing was also
rendered impure. And anyone who touched those
things would in turn become unclean and would need to
(11:00):
undergo ritual washing and wait until evening to be clean again.
So it's this idea of contagion, which is well known among
anthropologists who studied lotsof different societies
throughout the world and throughout history.
This idea that if I have something, whether that's good
or bad, that is considered contagious, everything I touch
also picks up that contagion. It's kind of like elementary
(11:23):
school kids out on the playground designating someone
who has cooties, right? If that person comes up and
touches another person, then both people have cooties.
And whomever those two touch also receives cooties.
And they, if they touch their lunch box, if they touch their
desk, if they touch their pencil, if they touch their
paper after they've turned it in, everything they touch has
(11:44):
cooties. That's this kind of law of
contagion. And so according to Leviticus
15, and according to the social and the cultural and the
theological and the political views and beliefs that were just
common and rampant in the ancient world, this woman would
have had this horrible conditionof contagion.
(12:05):
Everything she touched, everyoneshe brushed up against, even
incidentally, would receive whatshe had, and that was
uncleanliness. So now imagine how this plays
out over 12 years, right? In elementary school, you get
cooties, kids forget. And by the next recess, by the
next day, by the next hour, at lunchtime, everybody's forgotten
(12:25):
about it. But nobody forgot about it in
Jesus world. And for this particular woman,
people knew this was who she was.
This was her identity, this was who she was viewed as in God's
eyes. They believed for 12 years no
one could sit where she sat, no one could touch what she touched
for 12 years. She would have been unwelcome in
the synagogue for 12 years. She would not have been
(12:47):
permitted in the temple courts for 12 years.
She would have been cut off fromshared meals, from domestic
life, from physical touch for 12years.
If she had ever been married, and we don't know, her condition
would have ended the relationship undeniably for 12
years. If she had family, they distance
themselves to avoid contamination for 12 years in a
(13:07):
society where hospitality and community were central to
identity, she was functionally exiled for 12 years.
And while the ritual impurity laws were not designed to shame
or punish necessarily, the social consequences did exactly
that, especially in this honor shame culture, where purity was
equated with holiness and pollution with disgrace in many
(13:28):
Jewish communities of the SecondTemple period.
So the time during which Jesus lived, extended impurity would
bring not only exclusion, but also this deep social suspicion.
Impurity was typically interpreted as divine
displeasure. And when a condition lasted as
long as hers, 12 years, it wasn't uncommon for others to
(13:49):
begin viewing it as a sign of divine judgment.
And I want you to think about that for a minute because I
think that we'll look at this text and we'll look at their
culture and we'll say, whoa, that was a that was a rough
culture. But I think that that same
stigmatization exists in our culture today with exactly these
types of matters. If someone was at one point
(14:10):
viewed as impure, as an outsider, as an outcast,
possibly because of something they did, but often times just
because of who they are, maybe because of their family
upbringing, their family name, their social status, their
economic status, their politicalviews, it's pretty uncommon and
it's really difficult. That person usually has to jump
(14:31):
through a lot of hoops to prove and show over again and over
again that they are no longer that same person.
And so it's OK for you all to remove this stigma that you've
placed upon me. We still hold those same social
customs in our day. So I think we need to be careful
(14:51):
not to look at this story and look at it as something that's
far removed from us because thisis still happening among us
today. And some of you feel that
because you're the person who has been stigmatized, and some
of you, on the other hand, are the ones responsible for placing
those stigmas on those people. And we're going to get to all of
that here in a moment, but I just want us to be open and
(15:13):
honest about what we're reading and dealing with here in this
episode of Jesus. So over time, these theological
ideas become internalized. This woman didn't need to be
told outright that God was ashamed of her.
She just had to be told implicitly, silently, that her
body makes others unclean. And that's what happened.
That her presence disrupts worship, that her suffering
(15:36):
excludes her from the holy. And before long, the ritual
category becomes the spiritual identity.
Not just I'm unclean, but this is who I am.
I am unworthy. And so the woman had not only
endured physical pain for 12 years, she spent every resource
she had trying to be healed. Mark adds this detail.
And it's kind of painful when you think about it.
(15:56):
She'd suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors
and spent all she had. Yet instead of getting better,
she grew worse. Mark 526.
She wasn't just physically sick,but she was economically
devastated, socially invisible and theologically abandoned for
12 years. That's more than 4000 days of
(16:17):
waking up and knowing that wherever you go, you are a
threat not just to yourself and not just to an individual next
to you, but to your entire community, to your entire family
group. And in the eyes of the leaders,
the religious leaders, the theologians, the politicians,
you're a threat to the entire nation that your body is a
problem. So this is more than physical
(16:38):
illness. It's a social erasure.
It's theological exile. So now notice the contrast
between the characters in this story, the people Jesus is
interacting with. Gyrus is male.
She's female. Gyrus is named.
She's not. Gyrus is public, powerful,
respected. She's private, unclean, likely
seen as a curse. He approaches Jesus openly.
(16:59):
She sneaks up silently. He falls at Jesus's feet with a
crowd sympathy. She falls at his feet, fearing
his judgement. Gyrus is everything society says
is worth saving. She is everything society says
to avoid. Gyrus can offer Jesus honor,
which as we've talked about in this series with everything in
Jesus culture. On the contrary, if Jesus
(17:21):
associates himself with this type of woman, he can actually
lose the honor that he already has.
And not only that, but he could start to acquire shame.
He could actually sabotage his entire reputation and movement
in failing to fulfill the request of Gyrus and instead
stopping to help this woman. This is a huge deal that I don't
(17:41):
think many of us realize. And yet Jesus interrupts his
story for hers. This interruption, it's not a
detour, it's the entire point inthe logic of the Kingdom of God.
The story that society tries to skip over is the one God stops
to highlight. If Jairus represents the top of
the religious and social and political hierarchy, then this
woman, this defiled, forgotten, excluded woman, represents its
(18:04):
opposite. And it's her story, not his,
that Mark plants at the very center of this scene, and that
Jesus, in his travels from one place to another, interrupts his
plans to place at the center of his mission.
And she is the heart of the narrative.
She is the one through whom we learn what kind of power Jesus
has, what kind of presence he offers, and what kind of Kingdom
(18:25):
he's building. That's the theological weight of
this intergalation, this mark and sandwich.
It's not just a clever narrativedevice.
It's a prophetic act of reversal.
By sandwiching her story inside his, Mark dismantles every
assumption about whose voice matters, whose pain gets
prioritized, and who belongs at the center of divine attention.
(18:46):
And if you're paying attention, if you hear this not just as
history but as a mirror, it forces us to ask some pretty
challenging questions. Who are the people we've taught
ourselves to prioritize? Who gets immediate attention?
Who gets the immediate response from us and compassion?
And who has to wait in line, who's seen as worthy of rescue,
(19:07):
and who's quietly asked to stay silent?
Jesus doesn't just pause a miracle for someone important,
He reorients the entire scene around someone everyone else
ignored and pushed out. This is how the Kingdom works.
This is what the Kingdom looks like on earth, because that's
what the Kingdom looks like in heaven.
Because in God's economy, honor doesn't flow from title or
(19:29):
access or public claim. It flows from the margins.
It moves through the crowd, and it stops.
Not for the loudest voice, but for the one who barely dared to
reach out. So when this woman reaches out
to touch Jesus, not his hand, not his face, but the edge of
his garment, this isn't a light moment of faith.
It's an act that carries enormous risk and even more
courage. She touches him knowing that in
(19:51):
doing so she should be and couldbe and will be condemned.
That others will cry out againsther for making him impure.
That she has yet again violated boundaries.
That everyone has taught her forthe last 12 years that she's
supposed to fear. But what she believes, somehow
is that this man, Jesus, is not made unclean by contact with the
unclean. That in him impurity doesn't
(20:13):
spread, healing does. And that belief of hers, that
belief changes everything. Because when Jesus turns to her,
not with rebuke but with a blessing, he's not only
reversing her illness, he's reversing the narrative that has
governed her life, both for her and for everyone around.
He doesn't say, now you are clean.
What's he say? Look at the text.
(20:35):
He says daughter. He doesn't just restore her to
health, He reclaims her dignity.He doesn't just stop the
bleeding, He stops the silence. In the cultural and theological
world she inhabited, her body was a symbol of shame.
But in this moment, Jesus refuses to let her be reduced to
her condition. She's not a threat to him.
(20:55):
She's not a contamination to him.
She's not cursed. In the eyes of God, in the eyes
of Jesus, she's seen. She's whole, and she's named.
And notice, though again, she didn't grab his arm, she didn't
reach out and shout his name. She reached for the very edge of
his garment. Specifically, she reached out
for the fringe of his garment orthe tassel, what in Hebrew is
(21:15):
called a seat. Seat Now this is fascinating, so
check it out. According to Numbers 1537 to 41
and Deuteronomy 2212, Jewish menwere commanded to wear fringes
or tassels, or seats eat on the corners of their garments.
Each tassel included a single cord of blue, a rare and
expensive dye derived from sea snails.
Meant to symbolize divine command and heavenly authority.
(21:38):
The tassels served as reminders.Quote so you may remember all
the commandments of the Lord anddo them and not follow after
your own heart and eye. End Quote.
But overtime, tsitit evolved beyond sort of a visual cue.
They became sacred objects in their own right, symbols of
covenant loyalty, and also carriers of the divine presence
(21:59):
and spiritual weight. So in ancient Jewish traditions,
the knots in the windings of thetsitit were understood
numerically through gematria, which is kind of the assigning
of numerical values to Hebrew letters came to represent the
name of God, Yahweh, in the totality of the commandments.
To touch the fringe was symbolically to cling to God's
(22:21):
name, God's authority, God's nearness.
And so by the second Temple period, which is Jesus's time,
many people believe that the garments of a holy person,
especially their fringes, their teats eat, could actually
transmit blessing or healing. Not unlike how people in Acts
hope Peter's shadow would heal the sick, or Paul's
handkerchiefs or believed to carry divine power in Acts 5 and
(22:41):
Acts 19. These aren't magic tricks the
way we would see them today, or the way jokers out there are
selling healing water online andand blessed handkerchiefs if you
just mail them a check. These were what I would call
embodied theologies, where the ancients believed that the the
presence of the divine was so powerful and so mysterious that
(23:04):
it could actually inhabit physical objects that could then
through those objects affect healing into others or provide
protection from evil through those objects.
And in Greco Roman culture, similar beliefs surrounded
philosophers, prophets. The hem of a garment often
symbolized status, protection, divine affiliation.
But for this woman, Jesus wasn'tjust another holy man.
(23:26):
His seat seat weren't mere symbols.
They were the last hope of someone desperate to be made
whole. And Mark doesn't say she touched
him. That is, she didn't touch Jesus
himself. Mark actually says she touched
the seat. Seat, this sacred object that
served as sort of a conduit fromher hand into Jesus's body.
(23:46):
And Jesus doesn't rebuke her. He doesn't accuse her of
superstition or magic or irreverence.
Instead, he affirms her act as faith because she knew something
many of us forget. The power of God doesn't just
radiate from the center. Sometimes it pulses from the
fringes. We often hear this story with
soft edges in sermons and in artwork and in children's books.
(24:10):
It's portrayed as a quiet, reverent moment of faith.
The gentlewoman reaching out in hope, Jesus smiling, power
flowing in, a miracle unfolding sort of peacefully.
But that version really smooths over the danger.
It really misses the scandal, because what she did wasn't just
brave, it was transgressive. It was an act of defiance.
This woman's act, entering a crowd while in a state of ritual
(24:31):
impurity was a direct violation of Torah.
So in other it was a violation of religious laws, which, as we
tend to mishear as well, was actually breaking the law.
Because remember that in ancienttimes, the Law of Moses wasn't
just religious. The way we think of it today,
especially in Christian circles,we look at the Levitical laws
and the laws of the Old Testament.
(24:52):
We think, oh, those were religious laws and those are the
same way we would have church doctrines and then those would
be separate today from state andfederal laws, and we place our
structure on to the ancient world.
But that was not the case. Moses's law, and in this case,
this law from Leviticus was actual law.
Just like if I go and steal something or vandalize something
(25:14):
at the mall, I'm breaking the law.
That's what this woman is doing.She's actually not just breaking
religious customs or church doctrines.
We might say she's actually doing something illegal and
punishable by the courts in her day.
So it's a big deal for her to bethere and to do what she's doing
and her conditions not merely inconvenient, it rendered her
(25:34):
socially, physically, legally and spiritually contagious.
As we've talked about South, anything she touched would also
be guilty of violation of this same law.
So they're guilty by association, but it's not even
that they were the 1 associatingwith her.
That's why it's so bad in her world that she's even here, much
less doing what she ends up doing.
(25:55):
And that day she doesn't slip quietly through the empty St.
She steps into a crushing crowd.What Luke in his account of this
in Luke 8 caused a mass of people pressing in on all sides?
Luke 842. She squeezes past shoulders,
brushes up, jostles bodies. You can picture it.
It's like she's at the OKC Thunders Championship parade,
(26:15):
and she's gotten there late. That's what we did the other day
when the OKC Thunder were celebrating their championship.
But she wants to see the Thunderteam up close, so she forces her
way through the crowds to get tothe front.
Now, if I had done that, people probably would have put up a
little bit of a fight. I know some people were getting
there at like 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning.
We didn't get there till right before the parade was about to
(26:36):
start. And they did so, so they could
get a good spot close to the street that the Thunder buses
were coming down. And in our day, we have social
codes that say, hey, if you're late, you're out of luck.
So you don't just go barreling through to the front of the
line. In Jesus's day, those same
social codes existed. But there was way more to it
even than that. First off, nobody knew who I was
at the parade. There were hundreds of thousands
(26:58):
of people there, and I'm a nobody.
And so no one knows me or who I am there.
In this woman's situation, though, everyone knows who she
is. It's a small town and she's been
the town shame for 12 years now,so she's not going to sneak
anonymously through the crowds. Second, if I push my way to the
front, people are probably goingto push back.
Not because I'm unclean, though I might smell a bit because it
(27:19):
was like 90° out and we'd walkeda couple miles to that spot from
where we parked. But I'm not, legally or as
people thought of this woman, theologically shameful and
unclean and thus untouchable. I don't have the kind of
theological cooties that she has.
So this woman, under these circumstances, somehow still
presses her way almost to the front.
But maybe not quite. And each contact that she makes
(27:43):
with anyone else, whether on purpose or incidentally, is a
silent breach of every boundary set up to keep people like her
away from others and away from God himself.
Every step she takes risks exposure.
She knows it, and so does everyone else.
And then she does the unthinkable.
She touches a man. And not just any man, but a
rabbi, a holy teacher, a holy man some of the crowd reveres
(28:05):
and whom many view as a potential Messiah.
They don't quite know that yet, that that's who he is, but he's
heading that direction, and people are starting to wonder.
By this point, Rabbis in particular were expected to
maintain ritual purity, especially in public.
Her touch in the eyes of onlooker could and would defile
him. She's not just risking personal
embarrassment, she is threatening.
(28:25):
She is threatening Jesus own holiness, at least by the purity
logic of her day. And it's hard to capture the
full social danger here. But imagine something comparable
today. Some someone in an infectious
state marked by stigma, reachingthrough a high security zone to
touch the most revered leader inthe country.
Someone who's harmless breachingthe president's security just to
(28:48):
grab onto a suit pant. The public outcry would be
immediate. Can you imagine the pundits on
cable news just lambasting this woman?
Bodyguards would intervene. The headlines would frame her
not as a woman of faith, but a woman of disruption.
Shameful. What were her intentions?
Why would she think that she hadthe right to touch him of all
(29:09):
people? Her, the shameful woman who let
her get that close to him in the1st place?
She shouldn't have even been at the event.
And she doesn't ask, she doesn'tannounce.
She just reaches. She knows all of those
implications, and she does it anyway.
And she doesn't grab his hand orhis shoulder.
She aims low for the tassels hanging off the corner of his
(29:30):
garment near the ground. It may seem insignificant, but
that's deeply symbolic. She's not attempting to stop him
or to speak to him. She just wants contact, just
enough. In her mind, these tassels carry
the power enough to heal her. And it works.
In Mark 529, we're told. Immediately her bleeding stopped
(29:50):
and she felt in her body that she was freed from her
suffering. Now this is where we might
expect her to slip back into thecrowd, mission accomplished,
right? But instead, everything halts.
And notice what happens next. And maybe she did try to get
away, but Jesus doesn't let her.Look at the text.
It's not some random person or even the disciples who probably
served in some ways as a sort ofa soft line of security at times
(30:12):
between Jesus and the crowds. And we see this in places like
Matthew 18 and 19, where the disciples stop people from
getting too close to Jesus. And Jesus rebukes them, of
course, but they're not the oneswho even notice and stop things
at this point. What's Mark tell us?
It's Jesus who stops. He's the one who turns, and he's
the one who asks, who touched myclothes?
(30:34):
In Mark 530, the disciples are naturally confused.
You see the people crowding against you.
They're they're literally pushing up on you, they say, and
yet you ask, who touched me? But Jesus keeps looking.
And this is a critical moment that we need to pay close
attention to. He's searching for the one
person who touched him deliberately.
But notice the way he's searching.
He's not searching to shame, buthonestly to see who it was that
(30:57):
grabbed his seat. Seat.
And now the woman faces a decision, right?
She could vanish. She could keep the miracle to
herself. But instead, she steps forward.
And Mark uses a powerful word todescribe the way she is at the
moment she steps forward, she's trembling.
In the Greek, this is Tremusa. It's the same root used in other
(31:18):
Greek texts to describe people who stand before kings or divine
messengers. She's not excited to be called
out by Jesus, even in a positiveway.
She's terrified to the point where, even after what had to be
a physical sense of peace and exhilaration, she's visibly
shaking. The pain in her body might be
gone. Her body might be whole, but she
(31:39):
is physically, mentally, emotionally terrified because
she's just been caught stealing.One might say she's been caught
making contact with the rabbi, the holy man, and her soul is
still vulnerable. This is the moment where faith
gets real. Faith is not about certainty.
It's not about having polished confidence.
(31:59):
We sometimes imagine in the biblical heroes, it's not a
clean emotion. Often it's messy.
It looks like anxiety. It looks like risk and terror
and desperation. It's shaking hands and pounding
hearts. It's moving toward God not
because you're sure how He'll respond, but because you can't
stay hidden from Him any longer.And because something deep
(32:21):
inside you knows that. Regardless of who you are,
regardless of what your past situation looks like, regardless
of what others say about you, regardless of what the experts,
the priests, the pastors, the theologians, the social leaders,
your family members, the politicians say about you and
about who you are in God's eyes.Regardless of all of that, you
reach out and grab a piece of God's presence.
(32:42):
Just because That's faith. And this, for that unnamed
woman, is the first time she's been seen in 12 years in a
positive way. And she tells Jesus everything,
all the years, all the pain, allthe loss.
She lays it out not as a complaint, but because it's who
she is, because it's her story. And because Jesus asked.
I think that's critical. Jesus wanted to know.
(33:04):
And Jesus doesn't back away. He doesn't correct her.
He doesn't roll his eyes. He doesn't ask her why she
didn't follow protocol or wait for permission or contact his
representatives or go through some other channel.
Instead, he calls her something no one else ever has called her,
and something he doesn't call anyone else in the entire
Gospels. He calls her daughter Mark 534.
(33:29):
A title matters. It's intimate, affirming,
restoring. It's the only time in the Gospel
Jesus uses this for anyone. It's incredibly powerful.
She's not an interruption. She's not an intruder.
She is family. And not only that, but Jesus has
now taken her into his own family in a way that he hasn't
even taken anyone else around him, not the most powerful of
his followers or the closest of his disciples.
(33:51):
In so doing, He's declared to those around her and watching
this whole moment unfold in realtime, she's mine now, she's
God's. Now you have a problem with her.
You say anything to her, you disrespect or shame her ever
again. You and I are going to have a
problem. And this is what I would call
one of Jesus's mess around and find out moments.
He's had a few of those. And Jesus tells her in front of
(34:12):
everyone, Daughter, your faith has healed you go in peace and
be freed from your suffering. That's the beauty of this
moment. Her healing began with a touch,
but her restoration begins with a word, a title.
Daughter, In the end, her act offaith wasn't about confidence,
it was about courage. And that's a word many of us,
(34:34):
especially those who've carried shame, need to hear.
Faith isn't always clean. Sometimes it's trembling.
And that's when God honors it the most.
In a world in which the legal system could isolate someone
physically and spiritually, where being female, sick, and
poor mint layers of compounded shame, Jesus calls her daughter.
He doesn't just restore her health, He restores her place in
(34:56):
the community of God. She's no longer a defiling
presence. She's a beloved member of the
family she's honored. And all of this happens, keep in
mind, while Gyrus waits. Because Gyrus's daughter is
dying. So let's talk about Gyrus for a
second. Gyrus wasn't just a desperate
father. He was a synagogue leader, a man
of institutional power and religious prestige.
(35:18):
He represented everything respectable and honorable in 1st
century Jewish society. His daughter, though young and
vulnerable, was still part of a family at the top of the social
ladder. And Jesus, by agreeing to go
with him, is moving toward a highly visible, high stakes
miracle. This is the kind of healing that
could win him public support. It could cement his credibility.
(35:40):
He could rally allies. And frankly, no one would
question Jesus for prioritizing Gyrus over this woman.
The urgency of Gyrus's situationhasn't changed.
His daughter's still dying. But Jesus let's the powerful
wait in order to center the marginalized.
That's not just Jesus being kind.
That is theology. That's how God operates.
(36:01):
It tells us something about the Kingdom of God.
It doesn't function like a triage unit where priority is
given to the most connected or the most urgent according to
human systems. In Jesus Kingdom the least
becomes first. According to Matthew 2016, the
forgotten or remembered, the excluded or re centered.
The prophets had long declared that God defends the widow in
(36:23):
the orphan. Look at Psalm 146, nine
Deuteronomy 10/18 that he exaltsthe lowly and brings down the
proud. Jesus isn't just acting
compassionately, He's embodying the covenantal justice of
Israel's God. This moment isn't a deviation
from the mission, it is the mission.
Because God does not simply workthrough power, he rewrites what
(36:44):
power is for. He doesn't elevate influence, He
elevates presence. He stops fully present for the
one whom society has conditionedeveryone else to overlook, like
this woman. So he doesn't just heal this
woman, He reorders the entire system of who gets to belong.
What happens in this encounter isn't just a medical
intervention. It's a theological reversal.
(37:06):
The woman is healed, yes, absolutely.
But her healing is more than a transaction.
It's it's a transformation of how holiness, power and presence
are understood in her world. Holiness was a really fragile
thing. Ritual purity had to be
protected. A priest could become impure by
touching a corpse. A rabbi could be contaminated by
(37:26):
a woman's blood. The whole system was built
around containment, right? Boundaries keep the sacred
separate from the profane, keep the clean separate from the
unclean, keep God separate from evil, the world darkness.
And I think that's how we view things today, too.
We can look at the ancient systems, and I've grown up in a
(37:47):
Christian world, and I know how other systems are viewed from
our perspective. And we often look at these other
systems and we say, oh, they're all legalistic.
And they make God to be someone who's not interested in those
who are on the outside. And we talk about it as if it's
they and them and it's not us. But we do exactly this.
We have systems built around containment, around keeping the
(38:11):
profane out because we are responsible for protecting the
sacred. We keep the unclean out because
we're responsible for protectingthe clean.
And what we end up doing is building boundaries, not just
around our communities or our families or our organizations or
our political parties, but around God himself.
(38:31):
And when we start to do that, Jesus starts to have a problem.
In the woman's case, she was being kept out by the religious
conservatives of her day who combined God's name with the
maintenance of power and the establishment of boundaries that
kept people who weren't part of their inner circle, right, who
weren't one of them outside. And Jesus does everything
(38:55):
different. Jesus comes along and flips that
entire system, and he says, no, look inside those boundaries and
you're not going to find God because God is outside of those
boundaries. Standing with the people who
have been pushed out like this woman, standing with the people
who have been pushed out like the man in Luke 14.
And he doesn't recoil. He doesn't correct the woman for
(39:16):
reaching out. He doesn't even seem surprised
that power has gone out from him.
In fact, he affirms it. Power went out for me, he says
in Mark 530, not because it was stolen, but because it was
drawn. It was drawn out of him by
faith, not ritual. This is one of the most
astonishing theological moments in the Gospels, too.
Jesus's holiness isn't diminished by contact with
(39:37):
impurity because Jesus's holiness overcomes it.
OK, I'm going to, I'm going to repeat that.
Jesus's holiness isn't diminished, isn't weakened,
isn't made impure when it comes into contact with impurity or
unholiness because Jesus's holiness overcomes it.
(39:58):
And I think that's something important for us to realize.
When we try to keep to ourselves, when we try to hide
in our bunkers and just wait forJesus to return, because the
world is evil, because public schools are evil, because the
liberals have overrun the world.When we have that mentality,
we're essentially taking a view of holiness that says holiness
(40:19):
is too weak to come into contactwith darkness, with the
unholiness of the world, of those who disagree with us, of
those we don't get along with, of those who aren't like me.
And Jesus demonstrates right with this woman that holiness is
more powerful than unholiness. Purity is more powerful than
impurity. And in Jesus's case, Jesus
(40:41):
holiness, Jesus's purity overcomes the woman's impurity,
and it doesn't just overcome it and overpower it in this
dominant sense, it heals it. In the process of making contact
with her impurity, He makes her impurity into purity.
He makes her unholiness holy. So what Israel's priests feared
might contaminate them, Jesus willingly enters, and instead of
(41:04):
becoming unclean, he makes the unclean whole.
The flow of blood doesn't pollute him.
His power restores her, and thissubverts everything the purity
system teaches. In that system, contact with
impurity made you impure. But in the Kingdom Jesus brings,
his presence doesn't absorb defilement.
It's not like a sponge. And if you put that sponge into
contact with impurity, it absorbs it.
(41:26):
Instead. It radiates healing.
His body becomes the new locus of divine power, not the temple,
not the sacrificial system, not the priesthood, not the
politicians. Him, his persons, his presence.
Jesus is. Healing of the woman isn't a
random act of compassion, it's amessianic sign.
It declares that the healing sunhas risen, that holiness is no
longer fragile and defensive, but active, embodied, and
(41:48):
liberating. Her touch didn't break the law.
It reveals its fulfillment. This woman becomes a case study
in what happens when Kingdom logic replaces purity logic.
Instead of asking who's clean enough to be near God, Jesus
shows us a Kingdom that asks who's broken enough to need
God's nearness. And Jesus, the power of God,
(42:09):
isn't locked behind ritual barriers.
It walks the street. It stops for outcasts.
It leaks grace into whoever dares to touch it.
This woman's body had been the side of her shame for 12 years.
But Jesus changed all of that ina moment.
Not just by stopping to speak toher.
Not just by affirming her faith,but by making her body the very
(42:31):
place religion and politics had labeled as a curse, the site of
divine intervention and divine affirmation.
Her body is no longer a source of contamination.
It becomes a testimony. And this matters profoundly for
women, especially in a world both ancient and modern, where
women's bodies are too often policed and shamed and
scrutinized and theologized against.
(42:53):
In this story, Jesus doesn't overlook her.
He doesn't sidestep her story for the sake of a more important
miracle. He sees her, He stops for her,
and he rewrites her narrative. She's no longer that unclean
woman. She's no longer anonymous.
She is daughter and daughter. As I mentioned, it's not just a
nice word. It's a relational status.
It means belonging, especially for someone who hasn't belonged
(43:14):
to anyone or anything except shame and outcast for 12 years.
It means dignity. It means the God of Israel
doesn't see her as a threat to holiness, but as someone who
deserves to be made whole. She who had to hide in shame is
now named in front of the crowd,not to expose her, but to
validate her. The Kingdom of God doesn't erase
(43:34):
her story. It redeems it.
Every part of it, even the partsthat hurt, even the years of
exclusion and isolation. Nothing is wasted.
Not the bleeding at the trembling.
Not the risk. And by the end of the story,
it's clear that this woman didn't just receive healing, She
received something deeper, something quieter and more
enduring. She was named.
She was seen. She was called out.
(43:56):
Not for shame, but for restoration.
And that moment carries a question beneath the surface,
one that she may never have asked aloud, but one that echoes
across cultures and the pews andthe politics.
Do people like me matter to God?It's a question many carry
without knowing it. Especially if you've lived most
of your life on the edge of things.
(44:17):
Especially if your story doesn'tfit cleanly into the categories
that others praise. Especially if you've learned,
lowly and slowly and subtly, that you're easier for others to
admire when you're quiet and you're composed and you're
invisible, then when you actually speak up.
And let's be honest, the messages come from everywhere.
Sometimes from the pulpits, sometimes from the policies,
(44:40):
sometimes from inside our own heads.
They don't need to shout to be effective.
A sigh, a silence, a raised eyebrow when we walk into the
room is sometimes enough to makeus believe that belonging is
conditional. It's based on something that I
need to do right, to belong. But this woman doesn't accept
that. She doesn't ask permission.
(45:02):
She doesn't wait until she's more presentable.
She doesn't assume her pain disqualifies her.
Instead, she reaches not for Jesus hand, not for his face,
just the him, the friends, the thread hanging off the edge.
She doesn't even speak until after the healing happens, in
fact. And still Jesus stops.
He turns and he calls her daughter.
(45:23):
And maybe that's the point that in the Kingdom of God, even the
thread of faith is enough to unravel years of silence.
So here's the invitation, I think.
What if your story, your body, your past, or even your present
pain weren't a reason to shrink back, but the place where Jesus
is already turning to meet you? What if Jesus's holiness isn't
(45:44):
threatened by your uncleanness, the way so many of us have been
taught to think about holiness in God?
When we talk about God's holiness and we talk about
Jesus's holiness and we treat God and we treat Jesus in a lot
of ways like we think of celebrities or political figures
today. We don't go near important
people unless we're part of their world, right?
We don't have access to the VIP entrance.
(46:06):
The codes are the keys to the gated communities are the status
or importance enough to walk up and shake the hand of a
politician unless we're already one of them.
And all of that's fine, because someday they're going to meet
somebody who's right now, currently sitting on the throne
in heaven, laughing at their so-called power and fame and
untouchability here on earth. It really is laughable in the
(46:29):
grand scheme of things. But that's how we think about
things. We think about God and Jesus
like that, don't we? We talk about His Holiness as a
way to cause people to think shamefully about themselves and
to think twice before approaching him casually, or to
regret and feel terrible when wesin.
Because, as we say, God is holy.That's how it's talked about,
(46:49):
but I think this moment not onlydemonstrates the way Jesus
expects us to operate here on earth, that is regardless of who
we are, we're to go to those dark, those unholy places and
spaces on earth, not to shame oreven to witness to people,
because notice Jesus didn't evendo that, but to bring healing,
to restore dignity, to extend grace and mercy.
(47:12):
But on top of that, I think thismoment shows us what holiness
actually looks like. Jesus was and is the holy rabbi
walking through the crowds that day.
But in His Holiness, Jesus actually invited, welcomed,
recognized, honored the otherwise shameful and shamed
woman who just wanted to find some relief from her pain and
shame. In His Holiness, Jesus didn't
(47:32):
just witness to the woman and tell her to get right with God
and find God and get a better doctor and go to the right
church and then get involved anddo her thing and vote the right
way. He didn't say any of that.
He really didn't say anything. If you really look closely.
He just validated who she was. He took her seriously, He took
healing her seriously and personally, and He did so
(47:54):
publicly so that everyone aroundknew that she was not just
personally fixed in secret, but publicly and socially restored
to a place of honor among her community.
What if we started to think about God's holiness like this
as something that leads us to the margins and leads us out of
our doors and out of our communities and out of our
(48:14):
churches, rather than keeping usinside and keeping the
marginalized in the suffering inthe unholy world and the evil
out there at arm's length so that we can protect our own
holiness? Or if you're the woman in this
story, I think Jesus wants you to rethink what you've been
taught as well. If you've been taught that God
is holy and you are not, and because of that, you should feel
(48:37):
ashamed of yourself or view yourself poorly.
Or if your politicians have saidthat you've had to make some
tough decisions about your body and about your own situation and
your life situation and someone else's situation, that was
really excruciating and painful and difficult for you to make.
But you had to make it in spite of all of the noise going on
around you and the shame that those politicians are placing
(49:00):
upon you, and that you should feel utterly and eternally
ashamed, shamed about it. And that, yeah, Jesus still
saved you, but you still suck because of what you've done and
whom you've harmed in the process.
If that's you, if you are that woman in the story, I want you
to hear me right now, because all I'm doing is repeating
Jesus's own words. I want you to hear Jesus right
now. This is Jesus speaking directly
(49:22):
to you, daughter. Your faith has healed.
You go in peace and be freed from your suffering.
You are healed. You are free, liberated not only
from your suffering, but from any and all shame that the male
dominated, shame theological culture, society and politics
that have misrepresented God, misquoted Jesus, and placed an
(49:45):
insufferable burden on you. And I want to say to you right
now, you're 12 years are over. You don't need to say or do
anything. You are pure, you are honored,
you are free. You are daughter.
It's time to stop feeling shame and instead to start celebrating
life as a bharta Elohim, a daughter of God, as Jesus, as
(50:06):
Aramaic would have sounded. And if you've been taught to
stay silent because of who you are, what you've done, if you've
been told directly or indirectlythat faith looks like quiet
suffering and never reaching, this is your moment.
You don't need to have the rightwords.
You don't need to feel ready. You don't need to prove your
worth. You just need to reach because
(50:28):
in a world that sees some peopleas distractions, Jesus sees you
as a daughter. And he always stops for
daughters. He'll always stop for you.
And anyone who tries to stop Jesus or wants to shame you
because Jesus calls you daughter, just hold on.
Because he says to them just what he said to the raging
storms of chaos when they tried to devour him and his disciples
(50:48):
on the Sea of Galilee that day, and just what he said when
primordial death tried to keep him in the grave.
This is my daughter. Mess around and find out.
As we say Lake Ulmod, go and learn.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time on what
the Bible actually says.
What's up everybody? Welcome to the What the Bible
Actually Says podcast. I'm your host, Tyson put off,
and I'm so glad to have you heretoday.
If this is your first time listening, Bao Kaba, welcome to
the show. If you're a regular listener,
Bohem Hashaveem, welcome back. Before we dive in, don't forget
to subscribe on your favorite platform so you don't ever miss
(00:35):
an episode. And head over to
bibleactuallysays.com. Check out what we have going on
over there and what's coming up next.
And if you've been enjoying the show, I'd love it if you'd leave
a rating or share it with someone who's ready to go deeper
into their study of the Bible. Also, an incredibly exciting
announcement. I want to let you know that my
book, Jesus, the Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and
(00:57):
His Movement came out on May 30th.
That was Volume 1. Volume 2 is due out on June
30th. So here in just a couple of
days, it's volume one and two ofthe three volume series
published with Hey Call Publishing Co.
And it's the perfect companion to this podcast.
If you've enjoyed what we're doing here, digging deeper into
Jesus's life, his words, his mission, his historical and
(01:20):
theological and cosmic context, these books go even further.
They're accessible, they're eye opening and packed with insights
that'll change the way you see Jesus.
I guarantee it. And you can find more about
those or order your copy at several places.
I'll put a link at the podcast website, bibleactuallysays.com
or on heycall.co, the publisherswebsite.
(01:41):
Or if it's easiest for you, justgo to Amazon.
The ebook for volume 2 is up forpre-order now print copy.
As I say, it will be out June 30th.
So mark your calendars. Again.
This is volume one and two of my3 volume study of Jesus as
presented in the Gospels. And it's going to change the way
you see Jesus and it's going to give you clarity on what it
(02:02):
means to follow him in a world in which bad information and bad
takes on Jesus are all over the place.
So check it out. All right, let's dive in.
If you've got a Bible nearby, goahead, grab it because we're
going to look at the text closely today.
We're going to walk through thismoment in full.
And if you're on the go, don't worry.
Listen closely. Let's story unfold and read it
(02:24):
once you have a moment. So we're in Mark chapter 5
today, starting in verse 21. Let's read the text Mark 521 to
24. When Jesus had again crossed
over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd
gathered around him while he wasby the lake.
Then one of the synagogue leaders named Gyrus came, and
(02:45):
when he saw Jesus, he fell at Jesus's feet.
He pleaded earnestly with him. My little daughter is dying.
Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be
healed and live. So Jesus went with a large
crowd, followed and pressed around him.
OK, so at this point in Mark's gospel, Jesus's reputation is
swelling. Everywhere he goes, crowds
(03:05):
follow. He's been healing the sick,
casting out demons, teaching andthreatening the authorities, and
word about him and his movement is spreading.
And by this point, he's not justanother Galilean rabbi.
He's becoming a public force, a prophet, a movement, and he's
gaining steam everywhere he goes.
So when Gyrus, who's a synagogueleader, someone who's well known
(03:27):
and well respected, falls at Jesus's feet pleading for his
daughter's life, it's a moment of urgency.
And Mark makes that clear in hisgospel.
And it's also a moment of opportunity.
Gyrus isn't just a grieving father.
He's a man of standing, a religious authority, a
gatekeeper of institutional approval.
If Jesus helps this man, it could gain him legitimacy in the
(03:48):
eyes of those who still see him as dangerous and unconventional
and uncredentialed at this point.
And so Jesus goes with him. But what happens next is deeply
unsettling. So let's pick it back up in
verse 25. So it's Mark 525 to 34.
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12
(04:08):
years. She had suffered a great deal
under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had.
Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse.
When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd
and touched his cloak. Because she thought, if I just
touch his clothes, I'll be healed.
Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she felt in her
body that she was freed from hersuffering.
(04:31):
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him.
He turned around in the crowd and asked, Who touched my
clothes? You see the people crowding
against you? His disciples answered.
And yet you can ask, who touchedme?
But Jesus kept looking around tosee who had done it.
Then the woman, knowing what hadhappened to her, came and fell
at his feet, and trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.
(04:55):
He said to her Daughter, Your faith has healed you.
Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.
So this is where the story takesa really surprising turn,
because Jesus is in the middle of a mission to save a dying
child, Gyrus's daughter. And instead of just going
straight there to save Gyrus's daughter, he stops.
He pauses the entire procession,and not for another man of
(05:17):
prominence or for some new crisis that suddenly arises.
He stops for a woman who doesn'teven speak.
She doesn't make a scene. She simply reaches out from the
crowd and touches the hem or theseat.
Seat, you'll hear me. Call it, or tassel of his
garment. This woman, she's unnamed, is,
by every cultural and religious standard, invisible.
She's richly impure because of her bleeding, likely cut off
(05:41):
from normal worship, excluded from family intimacy, almost
certainly viewed as a contaminant in public.
And yet Jesus stops, not just for a moment, but fully and
intentionally. He turns to find her.
He looks for her. He listens to her whole story.
He speaks to her directly. In a society built around status
(06:02):
and honor and public recognition, as we've discussed
especially in our episodes on Luke 14, if you haven't heard
those, go back and listen to those.
In a society based around honor,Jesus redirects attention from
the powerful over and over to the marginalized, from those
with honor, to those who don't have honor, or to those who
have. He in this case directs
(06:22):
attention from a respected male leader to a suffering woman who
was used to hiding in the shadows.
And he does it deliberately. This isn't just an interruption.
This is what I would call a theological disruption.
Jesus halts a miracle for someone with standing in order
to restore someone. The system had failed.
Some of the religious world would have said was cursed,
(06:43):
someone who had spent 12 years hearing silence from God and
shame from everyone around her. And in doing so, Jesus forces
the crowd and us, I think, to confront a pretty difficult
question. What kind of Kingdom is Jesus's
Kingdom? What kind of empire is Jesus's
empire? What does that look like in
Jesus's mind? Because whatever this is, it's
(07:05):
not just about healing physical illness.
It's about the redistribution ofdignity.
It's about whom we see and whom we are willing to stop for.
It's about power that doesn't run through respectable
channels, but flows through compassion, risk, and presence.
Jesus doesn't just perform a miracle.
He rewrites the priorities of the moment.
And that sets the tone for everything else that follows.
(07:28):
So if you've been following in this podcast series, you might
remember a storytelling technique that we looked at back
in the episode on the Widow's Mite, what scholars call a mark
and sandwich, or what we might more formally call an
intercalation. Mark uses this structure more
than any other gospel writer. He begins one story, breaks it
off to insert a seemingly unrelated scene, and then
(07:50):
returns to conclude the first story.
It's really a tactic not just that Mark uses literally, but
that Jesus himself uses. And Mark just highlights this
about Jesus, the way he'll sandwich events or moments or
lessons between other ones to make multiple important,
exponentially greater points allat the same time.
So these narrative interruptionsare deliberate.
(08:12):
They're crafted not to distract,but to interpret.
The inner story and the outer frame are meant to reflect each
other, creating this sort of contrast and deepening the
meaning. And Jesus knew this, and Mark
knows this. And that's why Mark emphasizes
this when he's retelling his gospel story about Jesus.
And most importantly, the story in the middle.
(08:33):
It's rarely secondary, so it's not less important, but more
often than not, it's more important.
It's the key to the whole story.And that's exactly what we see
here in Mark 5. The episode begins with urgency.
Gyrus is a synagogue leader. He comes to Jesus in
desperation. His daughter is dying, and he
falls at Jesus's feet, begging him to come quickly.
(08:53):
Now, you got to understand, Gyrus isn't just any father.
He's a religious official, whichalso means he's a man with
standing and influence and honorand likely wealth.
And in the tightly woven social fabric of 1st century Galilee, a
man like Gyrus would have stood at the top.
So when he comes to Jesus and begs Jesus for help, people get
(09:13):
out of the way. The crowd makes room for his
request. Culturally, it would have been
assumed that if Jesus wanted to do what was right, he would have
prioritized this man's request to That would have been
culturally right. That would have been acceptable,
and that would have been viewed as the right thing to do in
God's eyes by everyone around. But before Jesus even reaches
(09:35):
the house, Gyrus's house, beforethe elite man's daughter can be
healed, the story is interrupted.
This whole episode is interrupted, and this is when
this woman enters. She's not named, she's not
announced, she's not welcomed. She's just there.
And really, we don't even see her until a few lines in to the
story. But this woman, she reaches
(09:55):
through the crowd and she touches Jesus's garment, which
sets off a chain of events that brings everything to a halt.
Mark tells us the woman had beensuffering from a flow of blood
for 12 years. Mark 525.
While the text doesn't specify the exact nature of her
condition, the language suggestsA chronic uterine hemorrhage.
This condition, especially in the ancient world, would have
(10:16):
caused constant bleeding, weakness, pain.
But beyond the physical toll, which would have been incredibly
hard on this woman, the consequences for her religious
and social and theological life were far more severe.
According to Leviticus 15, a woman with a menstrual discharge
is considered ritually impure. OK, for whatever reason, didn't
(10:38):
even matter. This designation wasn't about
sinfulness. It was about ritual status in
relation to sacred space and communal life.
Yet the practical effects were devastating on women.
Everything she touched, her bed,her chair, her clothing was also
rendered impure. And anyone who touched those
things would in turn become unclean and would need to
(11:00):
undergo ritual washing and wait until evening to be clean again.
So it's this idea of contagion, which is well known among
anthropologists who studied lotsof different societies
throughout the world and throughout history.
This idea that if I have something, whether that's good
or bad, that is considered contagious, everything I touch
also picks up that contagion. It's kind of like elementary
(11:23):
school kids out on the playground designating someone
who has cooties, right? If that person comes up and
touches another person, then both people have cooties.
And whomever those two touch also receives cooties.
And they, if they touch their lunch box, if they touch their
desk, if they touch their pencil, if they touch their
paper after they've turned it in, everything they touch has
(11:44):
cooties. That's this kind of law of
contagion. And so according to Leviticus
15, and according to the social and the cultural and the
theological and the political views and beliefs that were just
common and rampant in the ancient world, this woman would
have had this horrible conditionof contagion.
(12:05):
Everything she touched, everyoneshe brushed up against, even
incidentally, would receive whatshe had, and that was
uncleanliness. So now imagine how this plays
out over 12 years, right? In elementary school, you get
cooties, kids forget. And by the next recess, by the
next day, by the next hour, at lunchtime, everybody's forgotten
(12:25):
about it. But nobody forgot about it in
Jesus world. And for this particular woman,
people knew this was who she was.
This was her identity, this was who she was viewed as in God's
eyes. They believed for 12 years no
one could sit where she sat, no one could touch what she touched
for 12 years. She would have been unwelcome in
the synagogue for 12 years. She would not have been
(12:47):
permitted in the temple courts for 12 years.
She would have been cut off fromshared meals, from domestic
life, from physical touch for 12years.
If she had ever been married, and we don't know, her condition
would have ended the relationship undeniably for 12
years. If she had family, they distance
themselves to avoid contamination for 12 years in a
(13:07):
society where hospitality and community were central to
identity, she was functionally exiled for 12 years.
And while the ritual impurity laws were not designed to shame
or punish necessarily, the social consequences did exactly
that, especially in this honor shame culture, where purity was
equated with holiness and pollution with disgrace in many
(13:28):
Jewish communities of the SecondTemple period.
So the time during which Jesus lived, extended impurity would
bring not only exclusion, but also this deep social suspicion.
Impurity was typically interpreted as divine
displeasure. And when a condition lasted as
long as hers, 12 years, it wasn't uncommon for others to
(13:49):
begin viewing it as a sign of divine judgment.
And I want you to think about that for a minute because I
think that we'll look at this text and we'll look at their
culture and we'll say, whoa, that was a that was a rough
culture. But I think that that same
stigmatization exists in our culture today with exactly these
types of matters. If someone was at one point
(14:10):
viewed as impure, as an outsider, as an outcast,
possibly because of something they did, but often times just
because of who they are, maybe because of their family
upbringing, their family name, their social status, their
economic status, their politicalviews, it's pretty uncommon and
it's really difficult. That person usually has to jump
(14:31):
through a lot of hoops to prove and show over again and over
again that they are no longer that same person.
And so it's OK for you all to remove this stigma that you've
placed upon me. We still hold those same social
customs in our day. So I think we need to be careful
(14:51):
not to look at this story and look at it as something that's
far removed from us because thisis still happening among us
today. And some of you feel that
because you're the person who has been stigmatized, and some
of you, on the other hand, are the ones responsible for placing
those stigmas on those people. And we're going to get to all of
that here in a moment, but I just want us to be open and
(15:13):
honest about what we're reading and dealing with here in this
episode of Jesus. So over time, these theological
ideas become internalized. This woman didn't need to be
told outright that God was ashamed of her.
She just had to be told implicitly, silently, that her
body makes others unclean. And that's what happened.
That her presence disrupts worship, that her suffering
(15:36):
excludes her from the holy. And before long, the ritual
category becomes the spiritual identity.
Not just I'm unclean, but this is who I am.
I am unworthy. And so the woman had not only
endured physical pain for 12 years, she spent every resource
she had trying to be healed. Mark adds this detail.
And it's kind of painful when you think about it.
(15:56):
She'd suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors
and spent all she had. Yet instead of getting better,
she grew worse. Mark 526.
She wasn't just physically sick,but she was economically
devastated, socially invisible and theologically abandoned for
12 years. That's more than 4000 days of
(16:17):
waking up and knowing that wherever you go, you are a
threat not just to yourself and not just to an individual next
to you, but to your entire community, to your entire family
group. And in the eyes of the leaders,
the religious leaders, the theologians, the politicians,
you're a threat to the entire nation that your body is a
problem. So this is more than physical
(16:38):
illness. It's a social erasure.
It's theological exile. So now notice the contrast
between the characters in this story, the people Jesus is
interacting with. Gyrus is male.
She's female. Gyrus is named.
She's not. Gyrus is public, powerful,
respected. She's private, unclean, likely
seen as a curse. He approaches Jesus openly.
(16:59):
She sneaks up silently. He falls at Jesus's feet with a
crowd sympathy. She falls at his feet, fearing
his judgement. Gyrus is everything society says
is worth saving. She is everything society says
to avoid. Gyrus can offer Jesus honor,
which as we've talked about in this series with everything in
Jesus culture. On the contrary, if Jesus
(17:21):
associates himself with this type of woman, he can actually
lose the honor that he already has.
And not only that, but he could start to acquire shame.
He could actually sabotage his entire reputation and movement
in failing to fulfill the request of Gyrus and instead
stopping to help this woman. This is a huge deal that I don't
(17:41):
think many of us realize. And yet Jesus interrupts his
story for hers. This interruption, it's not a
detour, it's the entire point inthe logic of the Kingdom of God.
The story that society tries to skip over is the one God stops
to highlight. If Jairus represents the top of
the religious and social and political hierarchy, then this
woman, this defiled, forgotten, excluded woman, represents its
(18:04):
opposite. And it's her story, not his,
that Mark plants at the very center of this scene, and that
Jesus, in his travels from one place to another, interrupts his
plans to place at the center of his mission.
And she is the heart of the narrative.
She is the one through whom we learn what kind of power Jesus
has, what kind of presence he offers, and what kind of Kingdom
(18:25):
he's building. That's the theological weight of
this intergalation, this mark and sandwich.
It's not just a clever narrativedevice.
It's a prophetic act of reversal.
By sandwiching her story inside his, Mark dismantles every
assumption about whose voice matters, whose pain gets
prioritized, and who belongs at the center of divine attention.
(18:46):
And if you're paying attention, if you hear this not just as
history but as a mirror, it forces us to ask some pretty
challenging questions. Who are the people we've taught
ourselves to prioritize? Who gets immediate attention?
Who gets the immediate response from us and compassion?
And who has to wait in line, who's seen as worthy of rescue,
(19:07):
and who's quietly asked to stay silent?
Jesus doesn't just pause a miracle for someone important,
He reorients the entire scene around someone everyone else
ignored and pushed out. This is how the Kingdom works.
This is what the Kingdom looks like on earth, because that's
what the Kingdom looks like in heaven.
Because in God's economy, honor doesn't flow from title or
(19:29):
access or public claim. It flows from the margins.
It moves through the crowd, and it stops.
Not for the loudest voice, but for the one who barely dared to
reach out. So when this woman reaches out
to touch Jesus, not his hand, not his face, but the edge of
his garment, this isn't a light moment of faith.
It's an act that carries enormous risk and even more
courage. She touches him knowing that in
(19:51):
doing so she should be and couldbe and will be condemned.
That others will cry out againsther for making him impure.
That she has yet again violated boundaries.
That everyone has taught her forthe last 12 years that she's
supposed to fear. But what she believes, somehow
is that this man, Jesus, is not made unclean by contact with the
unclean. That in him impurity doesn't
(20:13):
spread, healing does. And that belief of hers, that
belief changes everything. Because when Jesus turns to her,
not with rebuke but with a blessing, he's not only
reversing her illness, he's reversing the narrative that has
governed her life, both for her and for everyone around.
He doesn't say, now you are clean.
What's he say? Look at the text.
(20:35):
He says daughter. He doesn't just restore her to
health, He reclaims her dignity.He doesn't just stop the
bleeding, He stops the silence. In the cultural and theological
world she inhabited, her body was a symbol of shame.
But in this moment, Jesus refuses to let her be reduced to
her condition. She's not a threat to him.
(20:55):
She's not a contamination to him.
She's not cursed. In the eyes of God, in the eyes
of Jesus, she's seen. She's whole, and she's named.
And notice, though again, she didn't grab his arm, she didn't
reach out and shout his name. She reached for the very edge of
his garment. Specifically, she reached out
for the fringe of his garment orthe tassel, what in Hebrew is
(21:15):
called a seat. Seat Now this is fascinating, so
check it out. According to Numbers 1537 to 41
and Deuteronomy 2212, Jewish menwere commanded to wear fringes
or tassels, or seats eat on the corners of their garments.
Each tassel included a single cord of blue, a rare and
expensive dye derived from sea snails.
Meant to symbolize divine command and heavenly authority.
(21:38):
The tassels served as reminders.Quote so you may remember all
the commandments of the Lord anddo them and not follow after
your own heart and eye. End Quote.
But overtime, tsitit evolved beyond sort of a visual cue.
They became sacred objects in their own right, symbols of
covenant loyalty, and also carriers of the divine presence
(21:59):
and spiritual weight. So in ancient Jewish traditions,
the knots in the windings of thetsitit were understood
numerically through gematria, which is kind of the assigning
of numerical values to Hebrew letters came to represent the
name of God, Yahweh, in the totality of the commandments.
To touch the fringe was symbolically to cling to God's
(22:21):
name, God's authority, God's nearness.
And so by the second Temple period, which is Jesus's time,
many people believe that the garments of a holy person,
especially their fringes, their teats eat, could actually
transmit blessing or healing. Not unlike how people in Acts
hope Peter's shadow would heal the sick, or Paul's
handkerchiefs or believed to carry divine power in Acts 5 and
(22:41):
Acts 19. These aren't magic tricks the
way we would see them today, or the way jokers out there are
selling healing water online andand blessed handkerchiefs if you
just mail them a check. These were what I would call
embodied theologies, where the ancients believed that the the
presence of the divine was so powerful and so mysterious that
(23:04):
it could actually inhabit physical objects that could then
through those objects affect healing into others or provide
protection from evil through those objects.
And in Greco Roman culture, similar beliefs surrounded
philosophers, prophets. The hem of a garment often
symbolized status, protection, divine affiliation.
But for this woman, Jesus wasn'tjust another holy man.
(23:26):
His seat seat weren't mere symbols.
They were the last hope of someone desperate to be made
whole. And Mark doesn't say she touched
him. That is, she didn't touch Jesus
himself. Mark actually says she touched
the seat. Seat, this sacred object that
served as sort of a conduit fromher hand into Jesus's body.
(23:46):
And Jesus doesn't rebuke her. He doesn't accuse her of
superstition or magic or irreverence.
Instead, he affirms her act as faith because she knew something
many of us forget. The power of God doesn't just
radiate from the center. Sometimes it pulses from the
fringes. We often hear this story with
soft edges in sermons and in artwork and in children's books.
(24:10):
It's portrayed as a quiet, reverent moment of faith.
The gentlewoman reaching out in hope, Jesus smiling, power
flowing in, a miracle unfolding sort of peacefully.
But that version really smooths over the danger.
It really misses the scandal, because what she did wasn't just
brave, it was transgressive. It was an act of defiance.
This woman's act, entering a crowd while in a state of ritual
(24:31):
impurity was a direct violation of Torah.
So in other it was a violation of religious laws, which, as we
tend to mishear as well, was actually breaking the law.
Because remember that in ancienttimes, the Law of Moses wasn't
just religious. The way we think of it today,
especially in Christian circles,we look at the Levitical laws
and the laws of the Old Testament.
(24:52):
We think, oh, those were religious laws and those are the
same way we would have church doctrines and then those would
be separate today from state andfederal laws, and we place our
structure on to the ancient world.
But that was not the case. Moses's law, and in this case,
this law from Leviticus was actual law.
Just like if I go and steal something or vandalize something
(25:14):
at the mall, I'm breaking the law.
That's what this woman is doing.She's actually not just breaking
religious customs or church doctrines.
We might say she's actually doing something illegal and
punishable by the courts in her day.
So it's a big deal for her to bethere and to do what she's doing
and her conditions not merely inconvenient, it rendered her
(25:34):
socially, physically, legally and spiritually contagious.
As we've talked about South, anything she touched would also
be guilty of violation of this same law.
So they're guilty by association, but it's not even
that they were the 1 associatingwith her.
That's why it's so bad in her world that she's even here, much
less doing what she ends up doing.
(25:55):
And that day she doesn't slip quietly through the empty St.
She steps into a crushing crowd.What Luke in his account of this
in Luke 8 caused a mass of people pressing in on all sides?
Luke 842. She squeezes past shoulders,
brushes up, jostles bodies. You can picture it.
It's like she's at the OKC Thunders Championship parade,
(26:15):
and she's gotten there late. That's what we did the other day
when the OKC Thunder were celebrating their championship.
But she wants to see the Thunderteam up close, so she forces her
way through the crowds to get tothe front.
Now, if I had done that, people probably would have put up a
little bit of a fight. I know some people were getting
there at like 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning.
We didn't get there till right before the parade was about to
(26:36):
start. And they did so, so they could
get a good spot close to the street that the Thunder buses
were coming down. And in our day, we have social
codes that say, hey, if you're late, you're out of luck.
So you don't just go barreling through to the front of the
line. In Jesus's day, those same
social codes existed. But there was way more to it
even than that. First off, nobody knew who I was
at the parade. There were hundreds of thousands
(26:58):
of people there, and I'm a nobody.
And so no one knows me or who I am there.
In this woman's situation, though, everyone knows who she
is. It's a small town and she's been
the town shame for 12 years now,so she's not going to sneak
anonymously through the crowds. Second, if I push my way to the
front, people are probably goingto push back.
Not because I'm unclean, though I might smell a bit because it
(27:19):
was like 90° out and we'd walkeda couple miles to that spot from
where we parked. But I'm not, legally or as
people thought of this woman, theologically shameful and
unclean and thus untouchable. I don't have the kind of
theological cooties that she has.
So this woman, under these circumstances, somehow still
presses her way almost to the front.
But maybe not quite. And each contact that she makes
(27:43):
with anyone else, whether on purpose or incidentally, is a
silent breach of every boundary set up to keep people like her
away from others and away from God himself.
Every step she takes risks exposure.
She knows it, and so does everyone else.
And then she does the unthinkable.
She touches a man. And not just any man, but a
rabbi, a holy teacher, a holy man some of the crowd reveres
(28:05):
and whom many view as a potential Messiah.
They don't quite know that yet, that that's who he is, but he's
heading that direction, and people are starting to wonder.
By this point, Rabbis in particular were expected to
maintain ritual purity, especially in public.
Her touch in the eyes of onlooker could and would defile
him. She's not just risking personal
embarrassment, she is threatening.
(28:25):
She is threatening Jesus own holiness, at least by the purity
logic of her day. And it's hard to capture the
full social danger here. But imagine something comparable
today. Some someone in an infectious
state marked by stigma, reachingthrough a high security zone to
touch the most revered leader inthe country.
Someone who's harmless breachingthe president's security just to
(28:48):
grab onto a suit pant. The public outcry would be
immediate. Can you imagine the pundits on
cable news just lambasting this woman?
Bodyguards would intervene. The headlines would frame her
not as a woman of faith, but a woman of disruption.
Shameful. What were her intentions?
Why would she think that she hadthe right to touch him of all
(29:09):
people? Her, the shameful woman who let
her get that close to him in the1st place?
She shouldn't have even been at the event.
And she doesn't ask, she doesn'tannounce.
She just reaches. She knows all of those
implications, and she does it anyway.
And she doesn't grab his hand orhis shoulder.
She aims low for the tassels hanging off the corner of his
(29:30):
garment near the ground. It may seem insignificant, but
that's deeply symbolic. She's not attempting to stop him
or to speak to him. She just wants contact, just
enough. In her mind, these tassels carry
the power enough to heal her. And it works.
In Mark 529, we're told. Immediately her bleeding stopped
(29:50):
and she felt in her body that she was freed from her
suffering. Now this is where we might
expect her to slip back into thecrowd, mission accomplished,
right? But instead, everything halts.
And notice what happens next. And maybe she did try to get
away, but Jesus doesn't let her.Look at the text.
It's not some random person or even the disciples who probably
served in some ways as a sort ofa soft line of security at times
(30:12):
between Jesus and the crowds. And we see this in places like
Matthew 18 and 19, where the disciples stop people from
getting too close to Jesus. And Jesus rebukes them, of
course, but they're not the oneswho even notice and stop things
at this point. What's Mark tell us?
It's Jesus who stops. He's the one who turns, and he's
the one who asks, who touched myclothes?
(30:34):
In Mark 530, the disciples are naturally confused.
You see the people crowding against you.
They're they're literally pushing up on you, they say, and
yet you ask, who touched me? But Jesus keeps looking.
And this is a critical moment that we need to pay close
attention to. He's searching for the one
person who touched him deliberately.
But notice the way he's searching.
He's not searching to shame, buthonestly to see who it was that
(30:57):
grabbed his seat. Seat.
And now the woman faces a decision, right?
She could vanish. She could keep the miracle to
herself. But instead, she steps forward.
And Mark uses a powerful word todescribe the way she is at the
moment she steps forward, she's trembling.
In the Greek, this is Tremusa. It's the same root used in other
(31:18):
Greek texts to describe people who stand before kings or divine
messengers. She's not excited to be called
out by Jesus, even in a positiveway.
She's terrified to the point where, even after what had to be
a physical sense of peace and exhilaration, she's visibly
shaking. The pain in her body might be
gone. Her body might be whole, but she
(31:39):
is physically, mentally, emotionally terrified because
she's just been caught stealing.One might say she's been caught
making contact with the rabbi, the holy man, and her soul is
still vulnerable. This is the moment where faith
gets real. Faith is not about certainty.
It's not about having polished confidence.
(31:59):
We sometimes imagine in the biblical heroes, it's not a
clean emotion. Often it's messy.
It looks like anxiety. It looks like risk and terror
and desperation. It's shaking hands and pounding
hearts. It's moving toward God not
because you're sure how He'll respond, but because you can't
stay hidden from Him any longer.And because something deep
(32:21):
inside you knows that. Regardless of who you are,
regardless of what your past situation looks like, regardless
of what others say about you, regardless of what the experts,
the priests, the pastors, the theologians, the social leaders,
your family members, the politicians say about you and
about who you are in God's eyes.Regardless of all of that, you
reach out and grab a piece of God's presence.
(32:42):
Just because That's faith. And this, for that unnamed
woman, is the first time she's been seen in 12 years in a
positive way. And she tells Jesus everything,
all the years, all the pain, allthe loss.
She lays it out not as a complaint, but because it's who
she is, because it's her story. And because Jesus asked.
I think that's critical. Jesus wanted to know.
(33:04):
And Jesus doesn't back away. He doesn't correct her.
He doesn't roll his eyes. He doesn't ask her why she
didn't follow protocol or wait for permission or contact his
representatives or go through some other channel.
Instead, he calls her something no one else ever has called her,
and something he doesn't call anyone else in the entire
Gospels. He calls her daughter Mark 534.
(33:29):
A title matters. It's intimate, affirming,
restoring. It's the only time in the Gospel
Jesus uses this for anyone. It's incredibly powerful.
She's not an interruption. She's not an intruder.
She is family. And not only that, but Jesus has
now taken her into his own family in a way that he hasn't
even taken anyone else around him, not the most powerful of
his followers or the closest of his disciples.
(33:51):
In so doing, He's declared to those around her and watching
this whole moment unfold in realtime, she's mine now, she's
God's. Now you have a problem with her.
You say anything to her, you disrespect or shame her ever
again. You and I are going to have a
problem. And this is what I would call
one of Jesus's mess around and find out moments.
He's had a few of those. And Jesus tells her in front of
(34:12):
everyone, Daughter, your faith has healed you go in peace and
be freed from your suffering. That's the beauty of this
moment. Her healing began with a touch,
but her restoration begins with a word, a title.
Daughter, In the end, her act offaith wasn't about confidence,
it was about courage. And that's a word many of us,
(34:34):
especially those who've carried shame, need to hear.
Faith isn't always clean. Sometimes it's trembling.
And that's when God honors it the most.
In a world in which the legal system could isolate someone
physically and spiritually, where being female, sick, and
poor mint layers of compounded shame, Jesus calls her daughter.
He doesn't just restore her health, He restores her place in
(34:56):
the community of God. She's no longer a defiling
presence. She's a beloved member of the
family she's honored. And all of this happens, keep in
mind, while Gyrus waits. Because Gyrus's daughter is
dying. So let's talk about Gyrus for a
second. Gyrus wasn't just a desperate
father. He was a synagogue leader, a man
of institutional power and religious prestige.
(35:18):
He represented everything respectable and honorable in 1st
century Jewish society. His daughter, though young and
vulnerable, was still part of a family at the top of the social
ladder. And Jesus, by agreeing to go
with him, is moving toward a highly visible, high stakes
miracle. This is the kind of healing that
could win him public support. It could cement his credibility.
(35:40):
He could rally allies. And frankly, no one would
question Jesus for prioritizing Gyrus over this woman.
The urgency of Gyrus's situationhasn't changed.
His daughter's still dying. But Jesus let's the powerful
wait in order to center the marginalized.
That's not just Jesus being kind.
That is theology. That's how God operates.
(36:01):
It tells us something about the Kingdom of God.
It doesn't function like a triage unit where priority is
given to the most connected or the most urgent according to
human systems. In Jesus Kingdom the least
becomes first. According to Matthew 2016, the
forgotten or remembered, the excluded or re centered.
The prophets had long declared that God defends the widow in
(36:23):
the orphan. Look at Psalm 146, nine
Deuteronomy 10/18 that he exaltsthe lowly and brings down the
proud. Jesus isn't just acting
compassionately, He's embodying the covenantal justice of
Israel's God. This moment isn't a deviation
from the mission, it is the mission.
Because God does not simply workthrough power, he rewrites what
(36:44):
power is for. He doesn't elevate influence, He
elevates presence. He stops fully present for the
one whom society has conditionedeveryone else to overlook, like
this woman. So he doesn't just heal this
woman, He reorders the entire system of who gets to belong.
What happens in this encounter isn't just a medical
intervention. It's a theological reversal.
(37:06):
The woman is healed, yes, absolutely.
But her healing is more than a transaction.
It's it's a transformation of how holiness, power and presence
are understood in her world. Holiness was a really fragile
thing. Ritual purity had to be
protected. A priest could become impure by
touching a corpse. A rabbi could be contaminated by
(37:26):
a woman's blood. The whole system was built
around containment, right? Boundaries keep the sacred
separate from the profane, keep the clean separate from the
unclean, keep God separate from evil, the world darkness.
And I think that's how we view things today, too.
We can look at the ancient systems, and I've grown up in a
(37:47):
Christian world, and I know how other systems are viewed from
our perspective. And we often look at these other
systems and we say, oh, they're all legalistic.
And they make God to be someone who's not interested in those
who are on the outside. And we talk about it as if it's
they and them and it's not us. But we do exactly this.
We have systems built around containment, around keeping the
(38:11):
profane out because we are responsible for protecting the
sacred. We keep the unclean out because
we're responsible for protectingthe clean.
And what we end up doing is building boundaries, not just
around our communities or our families or our organizations or
our political parties, but around God himself.
(38:31):
And when we start to do that, Jesus starts to have a problem.
In the woman's case, she was being kept out by the religious
conservatives of her day who combined God's name with the
maintenance of power and the establishment of boundaries that
kept people who weren't part of their inner circle, right, who
weren't one of them outside. And Jesus does everything
(38:55):
different. Jesus comes along and flips that
entire system, and he says, no, look inside those boundaries and
you're not going to find God because God is outside of those
boundaries. Standing with the people who
have been pushed out like this woman, standing with the people
who have been pushed out like the man in Luke 14.
And he doesn't recoil. He doesn't correct the woman for
(39:16):
reaching out. He doesn't even seem surprised
that power has gone out from him.
In fact, he affirms it. Power went out for me, he says
in Mark 530, not because it was stolen, but because it was
drawn. It was drawn out of him by
faith, not ritual. This is one of the most
astonishing theological moments in the Gospels, too.
Jesus's holiness isn't diminished by contact with
(39:37):
impurity because Jesus's holiness overcomes it.
OK, I'm going to, I'm going to repeat that.
Jesus's holiness isn't diminished, isn't weakened,
isn't made impure when it comes into contact with impurity or
unholiness because Jesus's holiness overcomes it.
(39:58):
And I think that's something important for us to realize.
When we try to keep to ourselves, when we try to hide
in our bunkers and just wait forJesus to return, because the
world is evil, because public schools are evil, because the
liberals have overrun the world.When we have that mentality,
we're essentially taking a view of holiness that says holiness
(40:19):
is too weak to come into contactwith darkness, with the
unholiness of the world, of those who disagree with us, of
those we don't get along with, of those who aren't like me.
And Jesus demonstrates right with this woman that holiness is
more powerful than unholiness. Purity is more powerful than
impurity. And in Jesus's case, Jesus
(40:41):
holiness, Jesus's purity overcomes the woman's impurity,
and it doesn't just overcome it and overpower it in this
dominant sense, it heals it. In the process of making contact
with her impurity, He makes her impurity into purity.
He makes her unholiness holy. So what Israel's priests feared
might contaminate them, Jesus willingly enters, and instead of
(41:04):
becoming unclean, he makes the unclean whole.
The flow of blood doesn't pollute him.
His power restores her, and thissubverts everything the purity
system teaches. In that system, contact with
impurity made you impure. But in the Kingdom Jesus brings,
his presence doesn't absorb defilement.
It's not like a sponge. And if you put that sponge into
contact with impurity, it absorbs it.
(41:26):
Instead. It radiates healing.
His body becomes the new locus of divine power, not the temple,
not the sacrificial system, not the priesthood, not the
politicians. Him, his persons, his presence.
Jesus is. Healing of the woman isn't a
random act of compassion, it's amessianic sign.
It declares that the healing sunhas risen, that holiness is no
longer fragile and defensive, but active, embodied, and
(41:48):
liberating. Her touch didn't break the law.
It reveals its fulfillment. This woman becomes a case study
in what happens when Kingdom logic replaces purity logic.
Instead of asking who's clean enough to be near God, Jesus
shows us a Kingdom that asks who's broken enough to need
God's nearness. And Jesus, the power of God,
(42:09):
isn't locked behind ritual barriers.
It walks the street. It stops for outcasts.
It leaks grace into whoever dares to touch it.
This woman's body had been the side of her shame for 12 years.
But Jesus changed all of that ina moment.
Not just by stopping to speak toher.
Not just by affirming her faith,but by making her body the very
(42:31):
place religion and politics had labeled as a curse, the site of
divine intervention and divine affirmation.
Her body is no longer a source of contamination.
It becomes a testimony. And this matters profoundly for
women, especially in a world both ancient and modern, where
women's bodies are too often policed and shamed and
scrutinized and theologized against.
(42:53):
In this story, Jesus doesn't overlook her.
He doesn't sidestep her story for the sake of a more important
miracle. He sees her, He stops for her,
and he rewrites her narrative. She's no longer that unclean
woman. She's no longer anonymous.
She is daughter and daughter. As I mentioned, it's not just a
nice word. It's a relational status.
It means belonging, especially for someone who hasn't belonged
(43:14):
to anyone or anything except shame and outcast for 12 years.
It means dignity. It means the God of Israel
doesn't see her as a threat to holiness, but as someone who
deserves to be made whole. She who had to hide in shame is
now named in front of the crowd,not to expose her, but to
validate her. The Kingdom of God doesn't erase
(43:34):
her story. It redeems it.
Every part of it, even the partsthat hurt, even the years of
exclusion and isolation. Nothing is wasted.
Not the bleeding at the trembling.
Not the risk. And by the end of the story,
it's clear that this woman didn't just receive healing, She
received something deeper, something quieter and more
enduring. She was named.
She was seen. She was called out.
(43:56):
Not for shame, but for restoration.
And that moment carries a question beneath the surface,
one that she may never have asked aloud, but one that echoes
across cultures and the pews andthe politics.
Do people like me matter to God?It's a question many carry
without knowing it. Especially if you've lived most
of your life on the edge of things.
(44:17):
Especially if your story doesn'tfit cleanly into the categories
that others praise. Especially if you've learned,
lowly and slowly and subtly, that you're easier for others to
admire when you're quiet and you're composed and you're
invisible, then when you actually speak up.
And let's be honest, the messages come from everywhere.
Sometimes from the pulpits, sometimes from the policies,
(44:40):
sometimes from inside our own heads.
They don't need to shout to be effective.
A sigh, a silence, a raised eyebrow when we walk into the
room is sometimes enough to makeus believe that belonging is
conditional. It's based on something that I
need to do right, to belong. But this woman doesn't accept
that. She doesn't ask permission.
(45:02):
She doesn't wait until she's more presentable.
She doesn't assume her pain disqualifies her.
Instead, she reaches not for Jesus hand, not for his face,
just the him, the friends, the thread hanging off the edge.
She doesn't even speak until after the healing happens, in
fact. And still Jesus stops.
He turns and he calls her daughter.
(45:23):
And maybe that's the point that in the Kingdom of God, even the
thread of faith is enough to unravel years of silence.
So here's the invitation, I think.
What if your story, your body, your past, or even your present
pain weren't a reason to shrink back, but the place where Jesus
is already turning to meet you? What if Jesus's holiness isn't
(45:44):
threatened by your uncleanness, the way so many of us have been
taught to think about holiness in God?
When we talk about God's holiness and we talk about
Jesus's holiness and we treat God and we treat Jesus in a lot
of ways like we think of celebrities or political figures
today. We don't go near important
people unless we're part of their world, right?
We don't have access to the VIP entrance.
(46:06):
The codes are the keys to the gated communities are the status
or importance enough to walk up and shake the hand of a
politician unless we're already one of them.
And all of that's fine, because someday they're going to meet
somebody who's right now, currently sitting on the throne
in heaven, laughing at their so-called power and fame and
untouchability here on earth. It really is laughable in the
(46:29):
grand scheme of things. But that's how we think about
things. We think about God and Jesus
like that, don't we? We talk about His Holiness as a
way to cause people to think shamefully about themselves and
to think twice before approaching him casually, or to
regret and feel terrible when wesin.
Because, as we say, God is holy.That's how it's talked about,
(46:49):
but I think this moment not onlydemonstrates the way Jesus
expects us to operate here on earth, that is regardless of who
we are, we're to go to those dark, those unholy places and
spaces on earth, not to shame oreven to witness to people,
because notice Jesus didn't evendo that, but to bring healing,
to restore dignity, to extend grace and mercy.
(47:12):
But on top of that, I think thismoment shows us what holiness
actually looks like. Jesus was and is the holy rabbi
walking through the crowds that day.
But in His Holiness, Jesus actually invited, welcomed,
recognized, honored the otherwise shameful and shamed
woman who just wanted to find some relief from her pain and
shame. In His Holiness, Jesus didn't
(47:32):
just witness to the woman and tell her to get right with God
and find God and get a better doctor and go to the right
church and then get involved anddo her thing and vote the right
way. He didn't say any of that.
He really didn't say anything. If you really look closely.
He just validated who she was. He took her seriously, He took
healing her seriously and personally, and He did so
(47:54):
publicly so that everyone aroundknew that she was not just
personally fixed in secret, but publicly and socially restored
to a place of honor among her community.
What if we started to think about God's holiness like this
as something that leads us to the margins and leads us out of
our doors and out of our communities and out of our
(48:14):
churches, rather than keeping usinside and keeping the
marginalized in the suffering inthe unholy world and the evil
out there at arm's length so that we can protect our own
holiness? Or if you're the woman in this
story, I think Jesus wants you to rethink what you've been
taught as well. If you've been taught that God
is holy and you are not, and because of that, you should feel
(48:37):
ashamed of yourself or view yourself poorly.
Or if your politicians have saidthat you've had to make some
tough decisions about your body and about your own situation and
your life situation and someone else's situation, that was
really excruciating and painful and difficult for you to make.
But you had to make it in spite of all of the noise going on
around you and the shame that those politicians are placing
(49:00):
upon you, and that you should feel utterly and eternally
ashamed, shamed about it. And that, yeah, Jesus still
saved you, but you still suck because of what you've done and
whom you've harmed in the process.
If that's you, if you are that woman in the story, I want you
to hear me right now, because all I'm doing is repeating
Jesus's own words. I want you to hear Jesus right
now. This is Jesus speaking directly
(49:22):
to you, daughter. Your faith has healed.
You go in peace and be freed from your suffering.
You are healed. You are free, liberated not only
from your suffering, but from any and all shame that the male
dominated, shame theological culture, society and politics
that have misrepresented God, misquoted Jesus, and placed an
(49:45):
insufferable burden on you. And I want to say to you right
now, you're 12 years are over. You don't need to say or do
anything. You are pure, you are honored,
you are free. You are daughter.
It's time to stop feeling shame and instead to start celebrating
life as a bharta Elohim, a daughter of God, as Jesus, as
(50:06):
Aramaic would have sounded. And if you've been taught to
stay silent because of who you are, what you've done, if you've
been told directly or indirectlythat faith looks like quiet
suffering and never reaching, this is your moment.
You don't need to have the rightwords.
You don't need to feel ready. You don't need to prove your
worth. You just need to reach because
(50:28):
in a world that sees some peopleas distractions, Jesus sees you
as a daughter. And he always stops for
daughters. He'll always stop for you.
And anyone who tries to stop Jesus or wants to shame you
because Jesus calls you daughter, just hold on.
Because he says to them just what he said to the raging
storms of chaos when they tried to devour him and his disciples
(50:48):
on the Sea of Galilee that day, and just what he said when
primordial death tried to keep him in the grave.
This is my daughter. Mess around and find out.
As we say Lake Ulmod, go and learn.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time on what
the Bible actually says.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.